Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

Dogs are a habit, I think.

Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

The silence of a shut park does not sound like country silence: it is tense and confined.

Good general-purpose manners nowadays may be said to consist in knowing how much you can get away with.

...there must be something she wanted; and that therefore she was no lady.

Young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them.

Forgiveness should be an act, but this is a state with him.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

I can't see or feel the conflict between love and religion. To me, they're the same thing.

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable.

Every love has a poetic relevance of its own; each love brings to light only what to it is relevant. Outside lies the junk-yard of what does not matter.

memory is to love what the saucer is to the cup.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.

Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

the process of reading is reciprocal; the book is no more than a formula, to be furnished out with images out of the reader's mind.

For people who live on expectations, to face up to their realization is something of an ordeal.

Sins cut boldly up through every class in society, but mere misdemeanours show a certain level in life.

Love of privacy - perhaps because of the increasing exactions of society - has become in many people almost pathological.

... any fictionis bound to be transposed autobiography.

every short story is an experiment - what one must ask is not only, did it come off, but was it, as an experiment, worth making?

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.